The Content Wrangler

Channel profile:

Content is a business asset worthy of being managed efficiently.

The Content Wrangler Channel covers the people, methods, tools and technologies designed to help you deliver the right information, to the right people, at the right time, on the right device, in the right format and language. Your content is your most valuable business asset. Let us show you how to manage it efficiently and effectively.

Making content teams work together is a struggle. On the one hand, creating engaging and sharable content requires a diverse team of professionals—from copywriters, editors, and subject matter experts to content engineers, user experience designers, and content marketers. On the other hand, we are pitting people who need data and a benchmark to make decisions against those that plan and execute without that information. Some look for short-cuts to formal processes, while others desire and follow complex workflows and plans. Some are visionary while others are only worried about the here and now.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and my special guest, Andrew Lawless, for a free, one-hour webinar focused on helping content teams collaborate better regardless of their differences. You'll learn about a methodology that has been successfully used to coach hundreds of thousands of employees—from Fortune 500 companies to smaller family-owned businesses. You leave with a fresh understanding of human behavior, and you'll learn the real reasons people act the way they do. You'll learn how to ease conflict, strain, and tension in team relationships and you discover how to provide information to people in a way that they can best absorb it.

Who doesn’t want more fame, more influence, more respect and a legion of superfans? But blogging and podcasting are a time suck and building up that legion of superfans will take you years. Great news: there’s an app for creating quick video shows with your friends and followers that gives them the three things superfans crave: access, attention and acknowledgement.

But hasn’t this collaborative video thing been tried before? Yes. Dozens of times. But no one else has followed the wisdom of Jerry Springer like the Clipisode team has. Jerry Springer? The talk show guy? Do we have to fight on camera and take paternity tests? Of course not. Not if you don’t want to.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and publishing software expert Brian Alvey for a free one-hour webinar that takes a deep dive into Clipisode, a unique app for creating collaborative videos. See how Clipisode turns the influencer takeover model inside out and puts broadcast-quality video publishing power into anyone's hands — letting you go from concept to execution in minutes. Plus, get a first-look at a new online studio brands and agencies are using Clipisode to build branded animations for video shows.

As a technical communication professional, you know your work is valuable. But what if you're called upon to define, defend, and promote that value? Is it enough to say that good technical content reduces customer support costs? No, it’s not.

You’ll discover how adopting an “intrapreneurial" mindset can help you sell the value of innovative ideas, new approaches, and improvements in technology. And, you’ll leave equipped with practical actions you can take to convince “bottom-line” focused management that spending money on technical documentation can help them achieve their business goals.

We think of content as documents: articles, books, presentations, videos. However, readers focus not on the documents but on the answers that they may contain — the answers to questions such as "what is this for," "how do I," "why should I," and even "what is all the information on this particular subject." The tools of structured content let us sequence, chunk, and reuse information in a customer-friendly way. Yet, often a single chunk of information is not the whole answer — that answer lies in the meaningful connections between various pieces of content.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and my guests, Joe Pairman of Mekon, and Andreas Blumauer, managing partner of the Semantic Web Company for this free webinar. Joe and Andreas will guide you on a journey that will show you how taxonomy helps us build meaningful connections so that readers can understand the big picture. They will talk about doing a better job of surfacing information for search engines—from Google to our own intranets. Ultimately, when granular chunks of content are networked with taxonomy tags as a knowledge graph, the system can answer questions that no-one has imagined yet — the myriad of messy, complex queries that arise in real-life knowledge-seeking.

Key takeaways:
• Benefits and principles of granular structured content, and how to prepare your own content for this new architecture.
• Best practices for linking structured content to standards-based taxonomies and pitfalls to avoid
• The underlying semantic architecture to build a truly mature and scalable approach to linking content and data

ABOUT THE PRESENTERS

Joe Pairman is Lead Consultant at Mekon Ltd., helping clients from healthcare to software realize the full potential of structured content and innovative information delivery with taxonomy. Andreas Blumauer is managing partner of the Semantic Web Company and is experienced with large-scale semantic technology projects in various industry sectors.

You bought the content management system, you migrated your content into it, and you might even have implemented DITA. So why is your content management such a mess? Content management projects have a way of sprawling into content un-management, especially if your organization started with a system but did not have a strategy.

There are several areas in which content management can become content “manglement.” The good news is, you’re already thinking in terms of managing your content, and chances are you can get things back on track.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, for this free, one-hour webinar along with my special guest, Regina Preciado, a content strategy consultant who helps companies transform how they organize, manage, and leverage content. Regina will take a look at what went wrong—and help you come away with a plan for diagnosing your specific content management issues, and how to start treatment. Regina will talk about where things are most likely to get messy; how to figure out what’s really gone wrong—it’s (probably) not “everything,” and the steps you can take immediately to diagnose—and start treating—your specific content situation.

We all know the importance of a well-defined buyer persona. It tells everyone at a company who we sell to and what makes that person tick. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. But, when a company grows globally, does that ideal customer change?

Last year, HubSpot decided to "Go Fast in France." There was a lot of fanfare, hiring of French staff and several references to a famous cycling circuit. But, there wasn't a whole lot of thought given to exactly who were marketing, selling and servicing.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler for a discussion with Christopher Englund and Marco Chieppe of HubSpot about the importance of building market-relevant buyer personas. You’ll discover how following a roadmap—and doing your research ahead of time—can help you develop international buyer personas that work.

We’ve all heard advice about how to improve source content. These tips and tricks usually sound like perfectly reasonable suggestions. Common sense, right?

But, where's the proof that these so-called best practices actually improve customer experience? In 2016, content strategists from Google visited 11 countries to talk to customers in order to find out what these real people actually want and need from their content. As it turns out, lessons learned from Google customer feedback research provided some surprising results.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler and my special guests, content strategy manager, Jon Ann Lindsey (Google) and global content strategy expert, Val Swisher (Content Rules), for a lively discussion about the importance of getting feedback before you make decisions about how you’ll translate and localize content. You'll learn several ideas you can use to adjust your source content so that your translations are improved. You’ll see lots of examples from content in the real world and leave with actionable items that you can implement immediately.

You will learn which problems Google found (they weren't just the usual suspects) and to make big improvements in your content that are easy to implement. And you'll discover why overtly "empathetic" language and reassurances don't always serve the needs of customers.

This program is brought to you by LocWorld35 Silicon Valley: The conference for global business. www.locworld.com

The World Wide Web has, in many respects, leveled the playing field—making it possible for businesses of any size to develop an international following. But, building an multinational presence means ensuring your content is global-ready.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and my special guest, senior analyst Rebecca Ray of Common Sense Advisory, as we discuss how to develop and use marketing personas, customer journey maps, categorization, and content tiering as the building blocks for a pragmatic global content strategy.

Attendees will learn how to apply domestic market discipline to global rollouts, steps to follow when creating a practical strategy, and the importance of validating domestic marketing profiles to ensure they are appropriate for global use. You'll also learn how customer journey maps, auditing and categorizing of content for local markets, and establishing content tiering criteria based on hard data can help you be successful.

Business today is digital, and that makes content critical. Where can you get tips, advice, and inspiration for the content side of business? Enter the online magazine for content professionals—Content Science Review.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and my special guest, content scientist Colleen Jones, for this presentation about Content Science Review. You'll learn what Content Science Review is — and what it's not. You'll discover the breadth of coverage and the benefits of both free and paid registration. If you're a writer looking to expand your influence, you'll learn how you can pitch story ideas to the editors.

As an added bonus, the editors will share their top-three reader-contributed insights of 2017!

You’re thoughtful about the web content you create to attract prospects and to serve existing customers. You take great care to make sure your content is well-written, properly-punctuated, and error-free before you publish it. It’s what you’ve always done. But, it’s no longer enough.

Join me, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, and my guest Andrea Volpini, CEO and co-founder of WordLift, for this free, one-hour webinar on how to quickly make your Wordpress web content more capable. You will learn how creating semantically-rich web content in Wordpress can help you develop new ways of interacting with your audience.

You’ll discover how building a knowledge graph can empower your web content—making it readily available to chatbots, smart crawlers, voice interfaces, and personal assistants. You’ll find why making your content machine-friendly can help you optimize your content, so it appears at the top of the search results. And, you’ll learn how making your content intelligent can provide you with actionable business insights and metrics that matter.

You may already know the value of content that is constructed based on its purpose rather than just presentation. But many solutions today lock that value into one product or silo, inhibiting collaboration and reuse across the enterprise.

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is a widely-adopted XML standard that delivers on this promise of intelligent content, but there are some inhibitors to adoption. Some see it as too complex. Others work to create content in compliance with an existing content format such as HTML or Markdown. With Lightweight DITA in the works, we can finally bridge the gap between the promise of intelligent content and the challenge of diverse authoring platforms and communities.

Join Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler and his special guests Michael Priestley, one of the original architects of the DITA standard, and Rob Hanna from Precision Content, for a free one-hour online discussion designed to help you decide whether you should consider adopting DITA or Lightweight DITA.